Strange Snacks of the World: Fudge Covered Ritz Crackers

I'm a giant fan of Western Beef--a local chain of stores that specialize in cheap cuts of meat in bulk, often at one-half or one-third the price you'd find at true supermarkets. In addition, where groceries are concerned, the place has a strange patchwork of products, some of which seem like something you'd find in a remainder store.

Wandering dazedly through the store, you can find butter in bulk, beverages in sizes you didn't know existed, and products that seem to have been test-marketed in other locales, but then withdrawn. What to do with the back stock? Sell it at Western Beef!

Ritz Fudge Covered might just be one of those products. Ads for it have never been run in the New York area, and the product isn't available at any other supermarket. It's a nutty idea to be sure--cover the already-sweet crackers in a thick chocolate pellicle.

Whether the box purchased was old or not is an open question, though the "sell by" date was March, 2010. Either way, the crackers inside the chocolate were as dry as sawdust. The chocolate wasn't very satisfying, either, though the coating was thick. A quick check of the ingredients list revealed transfats, cocoa instead of chocolate, high fructose corn syrup, and megatons of salt.

According to the website Chocolate Traveler , this sort of Ritz was actually made and distributed widely in the 1980's, though when the blogger contacted the Nabisco company, they had no record of it.

The best part of Fudge Covered Ritz is that you can play with them like dominoes.